Word: ghosts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Some parts of St. Louis now resemble a ghost town. The city has lost one-quarter of its housing stock to abandonment since 1950. Most of those homes were destroyed under a city policy of tearing down abandoned housing; the recycled bricks often ended up in suburban patios. One of the most notorious examples of St. Louis' physical deterioration is the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project, built by the Federal Government in the mid-1950s at a cost of $21.5 million. The high-rise complex was dynamited by the city in the early 1970s after becoming a cesspool...
THERE IS an understanding that even the lightest skin cannot hide any traces of African blood from the eyes of another Black person. For Toni Morrison, this blood reveals itself as a ghost. She sees ghosts haunting each pair of eyes, coloring every Black man or woman's skin, ghosts that become, for Black people, a cloak and an identity. Toni Morrison must stare very hard and deep into the brown faces she sees, watching these ghosts so intently that they have become alive themselves and are often more vibrant than the human beings whose lives they influence...
...story in space (Star Wars); Robert Bresson made it austere (Lancelot of the Lake), and six English cutups made it funny (Monty Python and the Holy Grail) But Boorman has never been cowed by precedent or expectations. In Point Blank (1967), he twisted the gangster genre into a psychedelic ghost story. In Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), he torpedoed The Exorcist's bad-seed plot for a Mach 2 excursion into religious ecstasy...
Garland Jeffreys has a new album that avoids both these routes, while creating a style that puts the rest of American pop music to shame. Jeffreys is an NYC street poet-songwriter who has to his credit three highly praised albums, Ghost Writer, One-Eyed Jack (now a cut-out), and American Boy & Girl, all commercial no-sells. His sound is reminiscent of Lou Reed, but with an essential divider: Where Reed's influences lie in jazz and his vocals tend to be experimental (sometimes to the point of irritating), Jeffreys thrives on another form of Black music--reggae...
...reggae songs recorded in London with reggae musicians, attacking hypocrisies and race riots, and a long, less happy-go-lucky, more personal, powerful version of the album's "Christine," as well as a throwaway song composed in the studio, "Lovers' Walk." There are similar superfluities on the album, like "Ghost of a Chance," but the extended length project accurately reflects Jeffreys' creative energy and vision. Daring to confront and reinterpret his own work, to create music with players of different nationalities and races, he cannot keep within the limits of a conventional album...